


Things You Said (Bond/Q)

by a_xmasmurder



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), James Bond - All Media Types
Genre: Conversations, Drinking, Emotions, Feelings, Gen, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-03 04:58:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13333992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_xmasmurder/pseuds/a_xmasmurder
Summary: Does what it says on the tin.





	1. At 1 a.m.

**Author's Note:**

> Short chapters are short. I'm trying to get back into writing after a hell of a holiday season, so bear with me. None of these chapters are linked in any way, each is standalone and jumps around in Bond's and Q's relationship.

“Left.” Q taps his biro impatiently against the marble counter - honestly, whose idea was it to put this thing in a flat? Goodness, this whole place is so ostentatious. “Go left, there’s an elevator shaft that goes straight to the roof.” He sighs. “Of course you knew that. What good am I, then? Up you go then, there’s a good lad.” 

His coffee maker stops hissing, and his hand slithers to the handle of his mug before he’s aware of it. “Make sure no one follows you.” He takes a sip and grimaces. “Oh, that’s  _ my  _ job? Thought you knew everything, Agent. Hmm. It might take a bit. Hold one.” He presses mute on his earpiece and moves around the island to the sugar tin next to the refrigerator, dumping a few spoons into the black heaven in the mug. His eyes stay on the green dot superimposed upon a rotating schematic on his computer screen. 

Agent Richards’ pursuers are still floors down and having difficulty following the agent’s escape route. There may be gunfire; seeing as Richards is still moving steadily, Q isn’t worried. He waits another twenty seconds. Right on time, Richards reaches the access door. The door alarm alert pops up at the bottom right corner of the screen, and Q glances over to his left as another window appear on a monitor he’d set up on the island - the CCTV footage of Richards lurching through the doorway. No major injury, and Richards breaks into a fast trot. Good. Q steps forward and places his cup of coffee next to the laptop, then cuts the emergency lighting in the elevator shaft and the power to the rest of the building with a little flourish of his long fingertips. 

He gulps two mouthfuls of hot coffee. “And that’s the pursuers done. There’s only a small leap to the next rooftop, where you will meet your extraction team. Have a good day, Agent. Try not to break Rome while you are there, thank you.” He takes his earpiece out and tosses it onto the counter. “Worse than children, I swear. Now that I’m awake, I’ll just hoover or something.”


	2. Through Your Teeth

“There’s a very good chance you won’t be making it out of here alive. No one is coming for you.”

Q blinks away tears and swallows the bile welling up in his throat. The situation is very clear to him. He’s bound to a metal support beam in the tiny sub-level room. He’s quaking with pain, cold, and fear - no amount of training will take away the most basic of human emotions. Three ribs are snapped and his shoulder is separated. The mirror that had been meticulously leaned against the wall across from him reflects the mess he’s turned into, bruising and blood layered on his pale skin; he’s been turned into a Pollock painting. 

He doesn’t need Thug One to tell him the obvious.

“You should just tell us what we want to know.”

Nothing for it, then. He’s going to die here. No point in giving in, is there?

Q spits, the glob of congealed blood splattering on the thug’s black boot. There’s a reason the previous M hired him and fast-tracked him right to the top. Like the old Quartermaster, he is entrusted with things so top-secret not even the Queen knows of their existence. He holds the entirety of England’s cybersecurity in his head. He’s smart like that. 

Unlike the old codger, though, he’d gone through weeks of interrogation resistance training. He never did like being at a disadvantage and he needed to know that he could persevere through the worst of it. None of what these bastards have done to him so far even touches what he went through during the training. He can do this. Even after Thug One got done hitting and kicking him after he spat, he still knew he could do this. He can persevere. 

The lights cut out when he lifts his head once more, and he turns a glare onto his kidnappers. They are less than shadows in the sudden dark. He can’t open his mouth without his newly broken jaw shooting daggers into his head. Clenching his teeth so the sharp pain keeps him awake enough to watch Bond destroy these men, he grinned. 

“Well, look at that. Seems England wants me back now.”


	3. Too Quietly (or so you thought)

Seeing James Bond in a snit is a bit like watching a very large tiger pacing in a very small cage.   Bond keeps a tight leash on the more unsavoury sides of himself, generally. The tiger’s cage always has a lock on it. It’s just, sometimes, that lock is rusted to the point of falling off. Or, like right this moment, that lock clearly isn’t going to be strong enough to contain the tiger. And the tiger? Is hungry. 

Honestly, it’s not bothering Q a bit, watching Bond pace his mental cage; rather, it makes for late-afternoon entertainment when the world isn’t eating itself alive.

Q glares around the conference room with open disgust. The advisory board is a buffet of soft men with no blood on their hands and no tangible connection to what they consider ‘wet work’ and ‘plausible deniability’. Collateral damage is nothing but numbers on paper to them. He hates them, and hates himself; he’s one of them, after all, isn’t he? He listens to the mindless drone of white old men with too much power and too much money trying to tell battle-hardened soldiers how to do their jobs, and let the hate wash through him. The meeting lasts hours, hours that Q and M and Bond could have used wisely. Q is delighted when they can finally leave. 

He’s able to hold his tongue for as long as it takes to get to their car. “Surely they have messages and more  _ important _ things to do than listen to a bunch of pompous blowhards…” Q mutters quietly.

“I heard that.” M slides into the back seat of the towncar, beaconing Q in alongside him. “It’s something you’ll get used to.”

“I’ve given up and just tune them out.” James is across from M, face turned to the window, hands folded over his raised knee. His lips entertain the idea of a smile. The tiger is in repose. “Though Alec and I have invented a new game when we work security detail together -”

“Which is why we keep you two separated on home soil,” M sighs.

“ - where we take turns guessing how quickly we can subdue each official and escape London,” Bond continues, and there is a smile on his lips now. “Purely mental exercise, I assure you. I have it down to 30 minutes for the Minister of Transportation. Alec doesn’t think I can do it that quickly. I won’t deny that today I nearly put it to the test.”

Q stares in wonder and swallows the lovely, embarrassing words that well into his throat. Some make it past his filter. “You’re amazing,” he breathes, trying his hardest not to say it loudly.

The quick slice of attention Bond gives him alerts Q that it hadn’t gone unnoticed.


	4. Over The Phone

Q hates dealing with mortgage companies. After the tenth rerun of some Top of the Pops with the automated ‘Your call is important to us’, he wants to throw the phone against the wall. “I just want to talk to a human being. I worked in tech support. I worked as an IT manager. I work at bloody MI-6 as the head of their  _ everything _ department, answer the bloody phone!” There’s a click, and for a wild moment Q thinks that his tirade worked.

‘Please hold, your call -’

“- is  _ important _ to us, yes yes, that’s why you can’t even be bothered to answer it!” Q jabs ‘end call’ and tosses his mobile to the table, dropping his head into his hands and groaning. Mungojerrie hops onto the tabletop and purrs at him. “Oh, cat. I’m having a bad day. If you want prawns, you’ll have to go out and catch them yourself.” His phone jangles, the most annoying ringtone he could find. MI-6 non-emergency call, then. They would have called his custom-built work phone if there is an emergency. God help the poor sod that is calling him on his day off. He allows himself a moment of baleful staring at his personal mobile before answering. “Hallo? This better be important.” He keeps harsher admonishments to himself in case M is on the other line.

“It could be.” 

Q pauses. Why the hell is James Bond calling from… oh. Q groans again. “You lost your mobile again, haven’t you?”

“You’re a sharp one.”

“Buy a burner.” Q hangs up with a smile and waits for his phone to ring again. Then again, Bond might show up on his doorstep, which won’t bode well for the agent. His cats are rather territorial.


	5. Didn't Say at All

It’s three in the morning, but clocks are a joke in the intelligence community. Time is an illusion. His day starts the moment he wakes up - no matter when that happens. Years upon years of all-nighters during finals weeks, clubbing until the sun came up two days later with help from select pharmaceuticals in his wilder days, and working endlessly in IT jobs all over London as a contractor seems to have prepared him for this job of keeping England and her subjects safe in their homes. He shouldn’t be happy with how his life has turned out. He shouldn’t be grateful for his disordered sleeping and eating patterns, shouldn’t be content with interrupted dates or false identities or yelling at grown men at five in the morning to ‘duck, you imbecile,  _ duck!’ _ , yet. Yet.

He weaves his way through the scattered desks and potted plants and randomly placed wireless printers to his domain at the helm of the most beautiful monitor setup he’s ever created. His messenger bag gets pushed aside on the white Formica after it is emptied of two laptops, a tablet, and a thin notebook computer. Q sets the notebook aside to boot the in-house electronics up, then he taps the keys of his desktop to wake it up. His personal mobile stays silent and dark in the pocket of the jacket he tosses over the barstool, but his work mobile is in his hand and already lighting up with the first emails of the day. He takes a swallow of his coffee and boots up the satellite programme on the right-most big screen. The left one displays his desktop screen, stars scattered across deep purples and pinks of an artistic rendering of a galaxy. The middle screen stays dark, waiting for instruction. Above his head, the rest of MI-6 is getting ready for the day or preparing exit reports. His own morning staff will be arriving in a couple of hours. 

“Morning.” R walks in behind Q, tea mug in one hand and a sheaf of paper held tightly in the other. His grey hair falls in wisps over his high forehead. “It’s been a slow one, so I sent the skeleton crew home early. I’ve been monitoring everything from my office. Want the current reports?”

“Yes, please send them to my laptop.” Q smiles. “Won’t be slow for long. Haven’t had so many seniors in the field since Silva.”

“I’m sure they’ll scare something up.” R heads towards the glass doors. “I’m grabbing some supper before doing the paperwork. Need any help?”

“I’m good, ta.” Q turns back to the display. The satellite feeds have loaded, giving him views of five different cities and three barren wastelands. His Twitter feed is lighting up, and there’s five new emails from Mossad. His desk phone blinks red with new messages. Both laptops are perusing the Internet, looking for keywords, keystrokes, sales and trades of the sinister sort. His desktop waits for him to start his projects for the day. Background processes are compiling data from every intelligence agency cooperating with England, along with a few that aren’t. His tablet lights up, letting him know that someone, somewhere, wants his attention. He smiles. “Good morning, ladies. Let’s get started.”

One could argue that the whole world is his domain via the constantly moving spun web of the Web, but that domain is shared with all the other hackers and cyber-junkies - friends and foes alike. This one spot though, deep in the bowels of London? It is his and his alone.


	6. Under the Stars

Q yawns and folds his arms behind his head, resting back against the ground. Cool blades of grass rub against his neck and arms. Beside him, Bond pulls up one leg and snugs it close to his chest, looking out of place on the knoll in his suit and tie.  

Q sighs and relaxes further into the grass. “It’s so beautiful out here.”

Bond is quiet. 

“I mean, the city herself is stunning at night. All lights and sound and people...from the top of the River House, you can see the very breath of London, the beat of her heart. But this?” Q falls quiet. He doesn’t even have the right words. Such a dunce. He feels his youth with a pang of injustice. What is he doing with this man? “I’m such a city boy. Never really saw the country as a child. It’s a given that I’d find a dirty old place beautiful, I suppose.” He pauses. “You. You’re from Scotland. Glencoe. So you probably feel most at home in the country.” He knows he’s prattling, but. But. He is out here with James  _ bloody _ Bond because the man asked him to, Heaven only knows why. Q looks at Bond. He’s not talking. He’s not saying a word. In Q’s world, that doesn’t happen. There’s always noise of some sort. Not talking seems to convey annoyance. So he doesn’t know what to do with this...whatever it is. “I mean, you love London, clearly. But -”

“Q.”

Q stares. Bond is smiling into the distance. He’s  _ amused _ . “Yes?”

“Shut up and listen.”

Q shuts up. It’s a comfortable silence. Q stares up into the sky with something close to childlike wonder. It’s a moonless night; this far from the lights of the sleepless city, they are bathed in starlight. Suddenly, he’s in freefall, sucked into the abyss of space. Crickets, frogs, and sedge warblers give their voices to a hymn of the early summer night. The damp air carries the scent of freshly turned earth - a badger is busy making a den or hunting for voles. A fox yips a quick cry of ‘I’m here! I’m here!’ The answering shouts from its mate startle Q out of his tumble. He finds Bond’s hand on his shaking shoulder. 

“It’s a different sort of beauty.”

Q blinks. “Sorry?”

James chuckles. “The city and the countryside, alive in different ways.” He looks at the sky. “But so similar to be bedfellows if you don’t mind a fox or two in your bins. You could say it’s a metaphor.”

Q gets it. “Oh.” He smiles and slides his hand over Bond’s. “Quite.”


	7. While Driving

_ In three hundred feet, make a left. _

Q stares out into the mid-day traffic snarl and growls a little in his head. He’d be in a better mood, but the satnav’s been saying the same phrase for the last ten minutes, and he can’t for the life of him figure out how to turn it off without dismantling the cockpit controls of the new sedan. The touch screen is supposed to be helpful, but it really isn’t. Damn anything that isn’t made by him personally. He’d have made a little button that would turn...

_ In three hundred feet, make a left. _

“Yes, thank you.” Q grumbles. He’s sure he wouldn’t be able to pull off a complete retrofit by the time the mess in front of him moves. London’s traffic is equally so predictable you could set your bloody watch to it and so unpredictable that you could fucking  _ cry _ . 

_ In three hundred feet, make a left. _

Q smacks the steering wheel. “I will! I promise you I will make that left turn. Just as soon as everyone else makes that left turn that their nav is telling them to. I am certain I am not the only miserable bastard out here in the pissing rain with a satnav that won’t  _ shut up _ .” Q drums his fingers against the steering wheel. Ahead of him, tail lights blink off. “Oh, thank you.” He lets off the brake and rolls forward. Then he has to slam on the brake again. “ _ Damn _ it!”

_ In two hundred fifty feet, make a left. _

“Here’s an idea. Bear with me, here, because I’m making this up as we go. How about we switch it up? Add some spice to our lives. How about we go right? Let’s go right.”

_ In two hundred fifty feet, make a left. _

Q groans. “What am I doing with my life? I’m talking to an obstinate piece of dated technology whilst caught in the mother of all traffic snarls.” He drops his head to the steering wheel. “All for pastries.”

_ In two hundred fifty feet, make a left.  _

“I need a flying car. Or a tank. Roll right over this mess. Middle finger in the air screaming ‘I don’t caaaaaaare’.”

_ In two hundred fifty feet, make a left. _

“I will give you fifty quid and a new voice file if you don’t tell me to make a left again.”

Silence.

Q waits. 

_ In two hundred fifty feet, make a left. _

“I hate everything.”


End file.
